HOW TO USE THE DICTIONARY

To look up an entry in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, use the search window above. For best results, after typing in the word, click on the “Search” button instead of using the “enter” key.

Some compound words (like bus rapid transit, dog whistle, or identity theft) don’t appear on the drop-down list when you type them in the search bar. For best results with compound words, place a quotation mark before the compound word in the search window.

THE USAGE PANEL

The Usage Panel is a group of nearly 200 prominent scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language. Annual surveys have gauged the acceptability of particular usages and grammatical constructions.

Synonyms: business, industry, commerce, trade, trafficThese nouns apply to forms of activity that have the objective of supplying products or services for a fee. Business pertains broadly to commercial, financial, and industrial activity, and more narrowly to specific fields or firms engaging in this activity: a company that does business over the internet; went into the software consulting business; owns a dry-cleaning business. Industry entails the production and manufacture of goods or commodities, especially on a large scale: the computer industry. Commerce and trade refer to the exchange and distribution of goods or commodities: laws regulating interstate commerce; involved in the domestic fur trade. Traffic pertains in particular to businesses engaged in the transportation of goods or passengers: renovated the docks to attract shipping traffic. The word may also suggest illegal trade: discovered a brisk traffic in stolen goods.

The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

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